Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Ooo, a social Llama

LlamaTone rate limiting means that you can set the ringtone for your GTalk app (or any other app) to a LlamaTone, and then have Llama limit how often that tone gets played. e.g. if you have a LlamaTone limited to 5 minutes, and receive a message at 9:00am, your GTalk LlamaTone will play. When you receive a message every 5 seconds later until your friend finally shuts up at 9:03am it won't make a noise. Llama will prevent the tone from being played until 5 minutes after the last message in the burst of messages. That means you won't hear anything until 9.08am. Maybe 5 minutes is too long, but you can adjust the number of seconds to whatever you think is comfortable. You'll need to edit your current profile to add a LlamaTone if you aren't using any already.

The social sharing lets you copy an event's conditions and actions as a URL. You can then paste this wherever you like on the internet, and people will be able to reuse it. Tap and hold an event to start Android's sharing intent, which will let you share it to most apps. Install a handy 'share to clipboard' app to copy it to the clipboard. A Llama URL looks like:

http://llama.location.profiles/[event-group-name]/[url-encoded-event]

The format actually supports multiple events, but the UI in Llama doesn't let you create these yet. You can hack your own by sharing two events and joining the last bit together:

Llama uses http:// rather than creating its own llama:// protocol, so that the Gmail app (and probably some others) automagically create a hyperlink that you can click to start Llama. The downside to this is people that don't have Llama installed on their phone will get a server not found error, or maybe a search page. Hopefully noone ever buys the .profiles domain :D

You'll be asked to confirm the imported events, so internet-numpties don't go around setting your volume to loud, or turning your screen off, or something horrible.